“PERVERSE:” A history lesson from Professor Jacobson.

POLITICO: David Gregory under investigation, out of headlines.

Just remember, if you’ve seen someone violate DC gun laws you can file a police report online.

SO IF YOU’RE ANTI-CLIMATE-CHANGE, ARE YOU ANTI-EVOLUTION? Climate change may have driven evolution, scientists believe.

NOW IF THEY WERE TEA PARTIERS, THIS WOULD BE NEWS: Greenwich Village couple busted with cache of weapons, bombmaking explosives: sources. “The privileged daughter of a prominent city doctor, and her boyfriend — a Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street activist — have been busted for allegedly having a cache of weapons and a bombmaking explosive in their Greenwich Village apartment.” At least they weren’t drawing comic books.

HOW TO TICKET a driverless vehicle. “Under Nevada law, the person who tells a self-driving vehicle to drive becomes its driver. Unlike the driver of an ordinary vehicle, that person may send text messages. However, they may not ‘drive’ drunk—even if sitting in a bar while the car is self-parking. Broadening the practical and economic appeal of self-driving vehicles may require releasing their human users from many of the current legal duties of driving.”

MICHAEL BARONE: Health Care, Housing, Education Worse When Government Helps.

MORE ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC FROM AN ALLEGEDLY RESPECTABLE NEWSPAPER COLUMNIST:

• Declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal. Hey! We did it to the Communist Party, and the NRA has led to the deaths of more of us than American Commies ever did. (I would also raze the organization’s headquarters, clear the rubble and salt the earth, but that’s optional.) Make ownership of unlicensed assault rifles a felony. If some people refused to give up their guns, that “prying the guns from their cold, dead hands” thing works for me.

• Then I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, our esteemed Republican leaders, to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control.

This kind of talk makes me want to buy an assault rifle. Or twelve. And really, dude, the fact that you’re angry doesn’t give you some sort of a pass from the norms of civil society. Or, if it does, be prepared to tolerate a lot of things that you’ll find intolerable. Because, you know, a lot of people are angry.

TWITCHY: The Top 20 Deleted Tweets Of The Year.

NOW THERE’S A SURPRISE: Obama lists those to blame for the fiscal cliff and he’s not one of them. “The Democrat also didn’t have time, apparently, to mention that the distasteful automatic budget cuts called sequestration were the idea of his White House.”

CHANGE: U.S., Canada, and Oz Prepare for the Asian Gas Wars.

Australia has designs on becoming the leading natural gas supplier for not only Asia, but the entire world. Indeed, the country has the offshore resources and the thirsty markets nearby in Asia to pass Qatar as the world’s top supplier of LNG.

However, Australia’s march towards energy superpowerdom is beginning to run into domestic problems—and new competition. Rising labor costs and high prices in Australia’s booming economy are making it unexpectedly difficult for the Aussies to export their gas and now energy-hungry Asian countries like China and Japan are starting to eye alternative and equally cheap gas from North America. . . .

Whether it’s Australian, American, or Canadian gas that wins the race to the Asian market (and most likely, there is plenty of demand for all three), a few things seem clear:

(1) The long era in which the Middle East was the global supplier of hydrocarbons is coming to an end.

(2) A global switch from coal to natural gas is one of the most practical ways available for civilization to begin the transition to a new kind of energy market. Greens take note.

(3) Asia is not going to be self sufficient in either energy or food in the 21st century, which, from the standpoint of those who hope to see the world becoming a more peaceful and economically integrated place, is a very good thing. The rising Asian powers will need a healthy, stable and secure global system to feed their people and run their economies.

Indeed.

ASK DR. HELEN: Why Are Republicans More Despondent than Liberals were in 2004?

SHOCKER: Death of Tea Party appears exaggerated, members in House appear to hold key fiscal vote.

AT AMAZON, Year-End Deals In Tools & Home Improvement.

Also, today only: Timex Ironman Race Trainer Digital Heart Rate System (Men’s and Women’s), $89.95 (40% off).

ARRESTED FOR “plotting to celebrate Christmas.”

John Gibson, call your office!

BENGHAZI: What’s Happening to Hillary? Only a clod would say the clot is a plot! “The suppression of information — the site of the clot — suggests 2 radically different theories: 1. fakery/exaggeration to evade testimony, or 2. something horribly serious. I read Sepkowitz to exclude the middle ground.”

MORT ZUCKERMAN: Brace For An Avalanche Of Unfunded Debt: The fiscal cliff isn’t as scary as the looming deficit and debt crisis about to swamp the country.

The greatest fiscal challenge to the U.S. government is not just its annual deficit but its total liabilities. Our federal balance sheet does not include the unfunded social insurance obligations of Medicare, Social Security, and the future retirement benefits of federal employees. Only in the small print of the financial statements do you get some idea of the enormous size of the unfunded commitments. Today the estimated unfunded total is more than $87 trillion, or 550 percent of our GDP. And the debt per household is more than 10 times the median family income.

Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debts that can’t be repaid, won’t be. Promises that can’t be kept, won’t be. Make your plans accordingly.

ANDREW KLAVAN LIKED ZERO DARK THIRTY.

The two and a half hour film does contain one scene in which a White House official says, in effect, “The president is a thoughtful, analytical man who won’t pull the trigger quickly because he doesn’t want to make the same mistake George W. Bush made with the WMD in Iraq.” That’s the sort of political reading we expect from Hollywood, and Bigelow and Boal make sure to get it in.

But the rest of the movie is a deadpan tribute to the intelligence agents and Navy Seals who slow by slow tracked this bad man down and sent him to meet a Maker very unlike the one he was expecting. Indeed, some could see the overall film as a reprimand to a president who took so much credit for what was clearly the work of men and women laboring through two administrations. Plus the movie graphically depicts how that work involved interrogation techniques that Obama ultimately prohibited — a prohibition which clearly hobbled the search.

Read the whole thing.

LABOR: Teamster Local Challenges Obama On NLRB Recess Appointments.